Slack has been many things over the years: a lifeline for remote teams, a graveyard for unread notifications, and, since 2021, a very expensive arm of Salesforce’s empire.
Now Salesforce wants it to be something else entirely: the brain of the modern enterprise.
On Tuesday, CEO Marc Benioff and his team introduced what they’re calling the biggest overhaul of Slack since the $27.7 billion acquisition. More than 30 new features, centered almost entirely on artificial intelligence, were announced for Slackbot, the platform’s built-in AI assistant.
The update spans everything from meeting transcription to a native customer relationship management (CRM) tool for small businesses, and even a desktop agent that watches what you’re doing across other apps and offers to help.
Reusable AI skills for every team
One of the most practical additions is a feature called AI-Skills. Think of these as custom recipes for work. Instead of explaining a task to an AI over and over, a team can define a specific job once, like “summarize this campaign brief” or “generate a budget plan,” and save it as a skill.
Once a skill is built, Slackbot is smart enough to recognize when you’re trying to do that specific task and will offer to run the skill automatically.
Meetings that run themselves
If you’ve ever zoned out during a Zoom call, Slack’s new Meeting Intelligence is aimed at you. Slackbot can now listen to meetings on Zoom, Google Meet, or Slack Huddles by tapping into your desktop audio.
It doesn’t just transcribe the words; it summarizes the decisions made and creates a list of action items as soon as the call ends. Because it’s connected to Salesforce, it can even log those action items directly into a company’s CRM system.
The Trojan horse for small businesses
Salesforce is also using this update to target smaller companies that might not yet have a formal system for tracking customers. Slack now features a native CRM built right into the chat interface.
Slackbot can read through your channels, identify when a deal is mentioned or a new contact is introduced, and update those records automatically. It’s a “start simple” approach: companies can manage their sales in Slack and eventually move up to the full Salesforce suite as they grow, without migrating any data.
Privacy and the Claude connection
Under the hood, Slack’s new brain is powered by Anthropic’s Claude model. This partnership allows Slack to handle complex reasoning while keeping the user experience snappy. With Slackbot now capable of watching desktop activity and listening to meetings, concerns about workplace surveillance are inevitable. However, the company insists everything is user-controlled.
Starting this summer, Salesforce will automatically include Slack for all new customers, ensuring that this new AI teammate is ready to work from day one.
Also read: Check out how Google is making AI features more accessible across the web in this quick breakdown.